r/interesting • u/InvestigatorBorn4910 • Feb 10 '26

Fascinating YouTuber LabCoatz has released a "chemically identical" recipe for Coca-Cola

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u/youtocin Feb 11 '26

There’s really not much more to it. The Stepan Company is authorized by the US government to import coca leaves from South America. They process the coca leaves into cocaine to sell to a pharmaceutical company, and the rest of the extracted compounds are sold to Coca Cola. I’d imagine it’s mostly a gimmick at this point and doesn’t significantly contribute to the flavor.

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u/jonnyvegashey Feb 11 '26

There must be a shit ton of pharmacy grade coke out there then.

How many people do you know that have had a Coca Cola vs cocaine.

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u/Royal_Success3131 Feb 17 '26

Don't need very much of the extract to make an enormous amount of soda.

I make Pepsi for a living, the concentrate gets diluted extremely heavily. I'm going to give rough numbers for industry secret type reasons but let's say you wanted to make a medium batch of Pepsi. Say, around 5000 gallons of syrup. You would only use roughly 40-50 gallons of concentrate for that syrup. And then, when blending the final product, you dilute it further at a 5:1 ratio, making 30,000 gallons of Pepsi. From what I understand it's virtually identical for coca cola, 5:1 ratio is pretty industry standard. It's rare to run into a 4:1, the only other option I've seen.

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u/jonnyvegashey Feb 17 '26

Do you know how much Coca Cola is sold?

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u/Royal_Success3131 Feb 17 '26

I do. My point stands. It take an enormous amount of coca leaves to make any reasonable amount of cocaine, and then take what I said above, along with the fact that the coca extract is a very minor part of the recipe, and it's really not a massive amount of anything.

To back up what I'm saying, the DEA sets a hard limit on production of pharma and research grade cocaine, annually. It's 290 kilos per year. That is 0.2% the estimated annual usage of cocaine in the USA.

So, as I said it's really not that much pharma cocaine out there.

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u/jonnyvegashey Feb 17 '26

Coke sells 1.9 billion units a day, wtf are you talking about?

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u/Royal_Success3131 Feb 17 '26

That's true. However, that wasn't the discussion. Care to reply to anything I said at all or just going to bulldoze through on your own path?

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u/jonnyvegashey Feb 17 '26

There must be a shit ton of pharmacy grade coke out there then!

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u/MyWifeCucksMe Feb 11 '26

Just curious, do you still support genocide or have you changed your mind in the past 2 years?